Every time I sit down to write to my weekly newsletter I experience a kind of overwhelm.
The cursor flashing blue against the dark screen while I wait for the words to come.
Instead of flow…a blank emptiness.
Yet just a few hours ago I was flooded with ideas. Snippets of possible stories and Enneagram examples. I could barely concentrate while being bombarded with idea after idea.
But now I’m here, at the keyboard, fingers poised, ready to capture those words, and now … nothing. Just me, a keyboard, and a flashing cursor.
In the past I would skip writing it, or wait until something felt “okay enough” to share, but lately I’ve been asking ChatGPT to fashion the threads into something coherent.
To do the heavy lifting. To shortcut the blankness.
Yet what we create is … well, it’s still me, but also not me. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t feel each word flow through me as I wrote it, or because the sentences lack something vital, something essential. They seem fine. But there’s an absence that’s hard to name.
I believe that missing piece is what’s in the inky blackness that jams the connection between my fingers and the insight or story I feel pulled to share.
And if I can’t hear that piece, then AI certainly can’t.
But it’s so hard to sit with the blankness.
To sit with the sense that my time is being wasted because I can’t find the words. The frustration that my brain doesn’t work the way it used to. That I’m the problem and the problem seems permanent.
But the blankness isn’t a flaw in the process.
It’s my inner protection system’s defense against uncertainty, of something that might happen if I share my words.
From inside the sticky jam, it’s hard to know what it’s protecting me from. But I can guess. Probably the fear of making a fool of myself. Embarrassment, criticism, humiliation. Of not being believed. Of being dismissed.
Because that’s what happened when I wrote as a kid. And it hurt.
But today, I’ve been able to sit with the discomfort. The words you’ve just read are what flowed from having capacity to stay with the blankness and let it be part of the writing process.
Instead of trying to evade it, reject it, fight it, to let it be there.
I don’t know if these words are good, bad, engaging, or whether they’d pass any metric AI, or what any decent writer, would assess me on. But these are the words that have emerged and my role is to trust them, to believe them, to give them space.
Yet when I get AI to do the heavy lifting for me, something gets lost. I don’t ask it for help with my blankness, I ask it to write an email. I ask it for the solution I think I need, but not to help me solve the problem I actually have.
But what’s vital lives in the blankness. In what’s masked.
Maybe AI can increase our output, but not our window of tolerance for siting with the sensations we find uncomfortable.
Except that’s where the magic of life lives.
Our inner protection system, our ego’s defences, as described by our Enneagram type, work hard to keep these difficult sensations out of our awareness.
They don’t care about us living a deep, rich, essential life. They don’t care about whether or not our work is fulfilling.
Their aim is to maintain the status quo. To protect us from what hurt, or was hard, or overwhelming when we were younger.
Our inner protection system doesn’t realise we’ve grown up.
Which is why what helped as a child, is limiting as an adult. It will do everything it can to protect us from ourselves, even if that creates suffering. Even if that cuts is off from the true wonder of life.
Maybe I’m getting a bit lyrical.
What I’m trying to say is that if we want to feel seen and known by others, if we want to feel safe and secure, if we want to have a deep sense of belonging, and we want those things to stick, that happens in the body.
Which means increasing our capacity to sit with discomfort, in whatever that means for each person.
Using the Enneagram as a guide, its things like:
- Eights avoid sensations of doubt, weakness, exposure, indecision, injustice, or vulnerability.
- Nines avoid sensations of separation, being overlooked, their desires, conflict, anger, being disrespected.
- Ones avoid sensations of incorrectness, criticism, indulgence, anger, bad behaviour, or unfairness.
- Twos avoid sensations of rejection, disapproval, lack of appreciation, or disconnection.
- Threes avoid sensations of looking bad, inefficiency, obstacles, sadness, going slow or potential failure.
- Fours avoid sensations of being misunderstood, not feeling seen or heard, ordinariness, inauthenticity.
- Fives avoid sensations of emotional overwhelm, feelings, pressure to share more than they’re ready to, and being intruded upon.
- Sixes avoid sensations of danger, fear, being an authority, inconsistency, their own strength and power, and unethical practices or people.
- Sevens avoid sensations of pain, limitation, power, conflict, criticism, and difficult conversations.
I believe that what’s best about life, lives on the other side of those uncomfortable sensations. Not from pushing through it, shortcutting it, denying it, strategising about it. But sitting with it, allowing it, letting it have a place within us.
Letting it be.
Through that, we can reach what’s often called our potential, our essence, our true self, self-mastery, our higher self.
Whatever you call it, I believe that’s where the magic lies.
Because life is inherently uncertain. When we can allow that uncertainty to unfold around us without defending ourselves against it, we can see the richness of what life can truly be.
That’s not a life free of pain, discomfort, or suffering.
But a life that’s whole.